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Once, I had to rent a flat in central London for a very brief time. It was a dump and cheap but if I wanted to buy food, coming home late from work, I almost had to take out a bank loan. Even a pint of milk had a 50 per cent hike.

At Community Care Live last week, community care minister Stephen Ladyman asked social workers to give him radical ideas for reshaping adults services. Someone should perhaps look at the perennial challenge of the poor marooned in a sea of affluence.

Waverley borough, for instance, is in very upmarket Surrey. In an effort to retain a mixed economy, it has operated a principled policy of re-investing the returns from council house sales back into housing for those unable to afford the over-inflated prices of the commercial market.


Now, the government has decided that 75 per cent of such revenue should be pooled to distribute as it chooses. The long-term result in Waverley, as elsewhere, will be communities with a vacuum where the young people in their twenties and thirties should be, driven out because they can't afford to live in their own area. They leave and so does a vital source of labour for the social care and service sectors.

Meanwhile, those on the very lowest income who do remain exist on benefits that fail to reflect that they live in one of the highest income areas in the country. Nor, as has been pointed out many times before, do they have access to a range of schemes such as Sure Start and neighbourhood regeneration.

They could move, of course. But why should they - and divorce themselves from a network of friends and family? That is also the reason why, if benefits were customised to reflect say, regional differences in the cost of living, most claimants would not uproot and relocate where benefits are highest.


The Conservative peer Lord Tebbit, once instructed job seekers to get on their bikes and find work. To his deep frustration, relatively few listened. In a cold and cruel world, the comfort of family - however fraught and tricky - is still infinitely preferable to a wage packet and living in isolation.

Initially, the most deprived areas in Britain required priority action. Perhaps now, however, it's time to adjust policy to help those whose equally desperate need is disguised by the healthy bank balances of their neighbours.